Strong Mail Presentation Big Ten It Conf July 2009

DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY USING STRONGMAIL July 2009 Presented by Christopher M. Harper Manager of Information Technology University Relations, Michigan State University charper@msu.edu (517) 355-9980 DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 1 JULY 2009

What is StrongMail? StrongMail? g • Vendor/solution selected after an RFP process conducted by University Relations ( ) • Both on-site (installed) and hosted (off-site, managed) options were considered during RFP • During RFP decided best ROI would be with an on campus solution p DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 2 JULY 2009

What is StrongMail? (cont’d) StrongMail? ( g ) • StrongMail as a dynamic messaging platform • Capable of sending 1 million messages per hour* hour • Dynamic message composition; no more static e-mails! • Automatic bounce management, but not j hard and g , just soft… Hard Soft Block Technical Unknown bounce bounce * This is why it is critical to have a Message Transfer Agent (or MTA) that gives you the ability to adhere to the sending rules the ISP’s have in place at any given moment in time. See http://www.strongmail.com/resources/blogs/it_email_infrastructure/ for more details. an gi en time http //www strongmail com/reso rces/blogs/it email infrastr ct re/ details DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 3 JULY 2009

Okay, but where’s the need? y • University Relations (UR) at MSU in charge of sending daily, daily weekly MSU news stories to various audiences audiences, amounting to over 400,000 messages per month • UR has been doing this for 5+ years g y math: 400,000 x 12 x 5 = approx. 24 million messages to date! • Old technology beca e antiquated, O d ec o ogy became a qua ed, cumbersome for IT staff to manage (required IT to be involved to send messages, required manual replacement of li k with dynamic l l t f links ith d i equivalents to track link click through rates) DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 4 JULY 2009

Okay, but where’s the need? (cont’d) y ( ) • UR also (in a fee-for-service model) designs, builds, sends e-mails for various departments on campus, to their alumni, e mails donors, students, etc. • Needed a self-service interface putting the “marketer” back in control (too many people outsourcing to Constant Contact, etc.) • More robust message composition platform capable of o e obus essage co pos o p a o capab e o doing more dynamically • XML, XSLT, subscriber content preferences anyone? • Ability to connect to databases external to the platform (something any other E-mail Service Provider (ESP) external to MSU won t won’t be able to do) DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 5 JULY 2009

Task: Make MSU Weekly News dynamic y y • Migrate MSU Weekly News to a dynamic e-mail publication, publication allowing subscribers to customize their content preferences • Already had web applications written to capture subscriber preferences (in essence) • Needed to determine how the message template would interact with these preferences • Via what technology? • Transition to a new IP address on the MTA, establish new sending relationship with the internet, ISP’s DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 6 JULY 2009

Task: Make MSU Weekly… (completed) y ( p ) • SM deployed and sending our MSU Weekly News e-mail every Friday y y y • Subscribers can customize their e-mail by including content from 13 categories of news available on www.news.msu.edu • Staff and faculty automatically opted in to receive “Staff and faculty” content (allowed for the printed staff and faculty publication MSU News Bulletin to become completely “electronic”) electronic ) DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 7 JULY 2009

Task: Make SM available to campus p • Identify good campus candidates and make StrongMail available to them in a self-service model self service • Migrate various managed campaigns from old MTA to StrongMail • Determine any external databases that StrongMail could be connected to • Sysbase ASE Oracle MSSQL, Teradata DB2 PostgreSQL ASE, Oracle, MSSQL Teradata, DB2, PostgreSQL, mySQL UR EBSP UADV DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 8 JULY 2009

Task: Make SM available… (on-going) ( (on-g g) • Currently 2 departments are on-board in a self-service capacity • Enterprise Business Systems Projects (EBSP) • University Advancement (UADV) DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 9 JULY 2009

Task: Make SM available… (on-going) ( (on-g g) • Several other departments sending e-mail via UR and ultimately via StrongMail DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 10 JULY 2009

Task: Make SM available… (on-going) ( (on-g g) DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 11 JULY 2009

A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail y y e- • Database of stories that drives www.news.msu.edu subsequently drives e-mail process DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 12 JULY 2009

A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail y y e- • Fields available at the time of inputting the story for the web made available to e-mail template via XML DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 13 JULY 2009

A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail y y e- • The XML content is transformed by an XSL template, driven by an XSLT engine within StrongMail DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 14 JULY 2009

A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail y y e- • A fundamentally different e-mail is generated for each MSU Weekly News subscriber based on their content preferences DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 15 JULY 2009

A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail y y e- • So think of the possibilities… DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 16 JULY 2009

And now… a demo! DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 17 JULY 2009

Strong Mail Presentation Big Ten It Conf July 2009

by Chris Harper on Jul 21, 2009

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Strong Mail Presentation Big Ten It Conf July 2009 — Presentation Transcript